Thirty years ago, as the recently-released European policy papers in the National Archives disclose, a number of key Irish ambassadors were asked to provide a balance-sheet of the advantages and disadvantages of Ireland's then impending membership of the EU, or Common Market as it was then known. To a man, they identified the potential reduction of Ireland's then inordinate economic dependence on Britain as a major bonus.
This timely book, seen in this particular perspective, indicates how much has changed in the past 30 years - and how little. It builds on the background provided by an earlier collection of essays under the same imprint, published in 1996 as Blair prepared to take power. Almost five years on, Ireland's part in the European project has developed dramatically, while Britain's remains mired in a slough of mis-perception, English nationalism and complicated transatlantic relationships.
This book's sharp focus on the consequences of the elision between "Britishness" and "Englishness", and on the will-o-the-wisp character of the British constitution, are among its significant strengths. It is clear-sighted about the various scenarios which extend into the foreseeable future for both of these islands (one of its contributors, Gerard O'Neill, is fetchingly described as "Ireland's best-known futurist"), and its general tone is one of benevolent exasperation at the failure of successive British governments to see what is obviously in their best interests, and to act accordingly.
It identifies the development of the Franco-German axis as the centrally important contemporary factor, and notes that it increases the pressure on Britain to make up its mind sooner rather than later. The only consolation, from Ireland's point of view, is that continuing UK vacillation, while undoubtedly serious for us, and possibly also for Northern Ireland, is not as cataclysmic as it would have been three decades ago.
There is one topic - touched on in one of Paul Gillespie's essays here, but which could perhaps do with expansion - which is central to the whole debate, and that is the balance-sheet of advantages and disadvantages, not for Ireland or for Europe, but for Britain itself. This balance-sheet is what will be critical in determining the attitude of British voters to any anticipated referendum on joining the euro. At the risk of over-simplifying the authors' analyses, it seems that they generally assume that further integration would basically be in Britain's interests, even as seen from London, with a problematic reservation about security policy. This obstacle could be overcome, in Brendan Halligan's view, by the development of a European union "with two cores of equal weight", the second one being a security core designed to integrate, in particular, the special UK-US relationship. (Halligan remarks tellingly that the UK's trumpeted reluctance to share effective sovereignty is curiously absent where the US is concerned.)
This suggested solution, however, has to confront Blair's central political difficulty: how to persuade a perennially sceptical (at best) English (not necessarily British) electorate of the wisdom of a pro-European choice. In this narrowly political context, the idea of a "two-core" Europe, while theoretically attractive, begins to sound like the constitutional equivalent of the Millennium Dome.
New Labour has already shown, on a number of key issues, that it is capable of spectacularly misjudging the mood of the electorate. Blair and his pro-European allies within the Cabinet will be making a terrible mistake if they continue to regard the result of the 1997 election as proof that the British electorate will always do the sensible thing when asked nicely. This is a far tougher battle than New Labour has ever fought, and to win it he will need many friends from outside his own party's ranks. Even then, he may still flinch from it.
John Horgan is Professor of Journalism at Dublin City University, the author of Noel Browne: Passionate Outsider, and a former MEP